Page 29 of Overexposed

Once I got to his rooms, Tove turned me, as you know he did. I will tell you of the act when it becomes relevant to you, which isn’t tonight.

Now, what I will tell you about, mostly because every other fiction tells it wrong, is hunger, or more precisely, the absence of it.

I went up the stairs to Tove’s room as human and descended as vampire. Then, did I fall upon the boy I had loved with ravenous hunger? No. Actually, I found myself walking into the kitchen where Owain was preparing the morning meal.

“Owain,” I said, and he jumped. Walking silently isn’t anything that comes as an effort, you see.

“Auris,” he said, and his surprise made his young face look wide and open. “Your eyes are silver too. Like Tove’s.”

I nodded or shrugged. I wasn’t sure what to tell him, or if any words were needed.

And maybe they weren’t, because Owain shifted into one of those innocent smiles that said,you are my prince, no matter what you look like.

“Breakfast is just about ready. There are some of the wild berries you like. Let me get you a bowl,” he said.

I told you that human food does not agree with a vampire’s stomach. Owain made me my favorite breakfast, freshly picked berries were a treat he’d saved for me, and I vomited it up all over the kitchen floor. Tove had told me that this would happen, but I have told you before that habit is hard to unlearn when it comes to food, even harder when it comes to affection.

My mother saw, of course, called me an idiot, and told me to wipe the floor clean myself instead of letting Owain do it. I may have been a new vampire, but I was not in a position to argue with my mother, and so I cleaned up my own sick, Owain flustered and concerned and hovering while asking whether he should make me a healing tea. I almost told him that yes, I would like that tea, but my mother grabbed a short broom she used for the counters and whacked me over the head with it.

She said, “It is rare to receive a fucking that is good enough to stop your brain from functioning. Although, Owain, if that is the case, perhaps you can find yourself a man who makes you tread on spice and sandalwood, not his own sick.”

My mother, you see, was never shy with her opinions. I politely told Owain I would not be needing any tea.

As embarrassing as the episode was, it didn’t touch on vampiric hunger. All those teen angst shows you’ve seen tell you that it is connected to lust. It’s not. It doesn’t feel like human hunger either. It isn’t felt. Hunger, for the vampire, is an insistent weakness, a failing of our senses and strength. It is not a force that drives us to seek out food. It is the absence of force. In very young vampires such as myself at the time, it can sometimes manifest as a piercing migraine, but that won’t happen always and not when one is very starved.

When we grow older, we learn to manage it much better, and while the vampiric hunger is nothing like human hunger, we learn to recognize it as what it is. We learn to feed it, when necessary.

At the same time, the feeding is quite enjoyable. You know it is. I fed from you earlier today. But it wasn’t your blood that made me want to get myself off, it was you offering, giving. That’s a very intoxicating thing to me.

So while you may have suspected Tove wanted me to learn to manage my hunger on Owain’s neck, that was not the case. Tove was quite aware that, because of my closeness to Owain, I was even less likely to take his blood, and Tove was not the kind of teacher to force me to hurt someone I cared about.

That meant that the adventures continued. Those, too, will be something I tell you about later. They have nothing to do with the folly that is this tale.

I wonder if you’ve guessed it. Don’t tell me. Don’t guess. Let me get through it in my own pace.

For over ten years, I tried to put the prophecy my mother gave me aside, and I tried to love Owain as hard as I could. He was the fairy tale princess to my noble prince, he was the melody to my lute strings. At least, that’s what I told myself. It’s what we told each other.

I let him sleep in my bed, you know. It wasn’t like I used it anymore, and I was that sparkly creepy vampire watching a lover as he slept. I was still young enough to envy him sleep and begrudge him leaving me with my own thoughts while he slept.

One morning, he opened one of the windows in my bedroom and turned his face to the rising sun, and I saw the wrinkles branching out from the corners of his eyes.

“What are you looking at, my prince?” he asked, all play. He called me “my prince” a lot. He simply couldn’t be made to stop, much like he’d never stopped calling Tove a lord. I’m not even sure I tried very hard.

“Just looking at you,” I told him. “You are more enchanting than the sunrise,” I added, because Tove had done a good job in his rhetoric training.

Owain accepted it that day, this little white lie. Or maybe he didn’t, and he questioned it. It doesn’t matter. The conversations in which age came up piled up, and in the end, the pile in front of us was an ugly, smelly thing.

Understand that Tove had taught me well, and that I was very aware of his rules: Do not make another randomly. Do not make someone who is weak. Do not make them if you haven’t trained them. Never make them for selfish reasons.

Can you guess my folly? You can. You do. I see it on your face -- but stop before you allow yourself to pity me. I don’t deserve it. I robbed a man I professed to care for deeply of his human life, and it is not something that can be forgiven or forgotten, ever.

I made Owain, without Tove’s permission of course, and against his will if I had even asked his will. I hadn’t.

When Tove smelled the blood, he came into my room, as close to a fury as I have ever seen him. But it was a fury without teeth. It was not a fury at all, but grief dressed in fury’s clothing.

“I took him in to teach you a lesson, Auris,” Tove said. “It wasn’t this lesson. It shouldn’t have been this lesson. My foolish, foolish boys.” He hugged us both and left us, me to explain the change that Owain was living through.

I will not go into the details. Owain managed a few years. It was good, in the beginning, but where I handled my training and the changes to my body well, he had issues. The blood drinking, he didn’t like that. That is the major issue, the first killer that will get most young vampires. It takes skill to bite fast and just deep enough. One wound -- we only ever make one wound, then close it. Owain was hesitant, so I would have to feed him more often than not. He couldn’t handle entrancement at all, and his speed was unreliable, more likely to leave him with a broken bone than where he wanted to go.

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